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Today’s guest is Vlad Tarko of Dickinson College. We discuss the life and work of Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Vlad is the author of Elinor Ostrom: An intellectual biography. We discuss Elinor Ostrom’s work on polycentric governance, the management of common-pool resources, and policing. We also discuss the continuing work scholars are doing in this research area, including Vlad’s new book Public Governance and the Classical-Liberal Perspective: Political Economy Foundations co-authored with Paul Dragos Aligica and Pete Boettke. Download this episode. Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.The post Elinor...

My guest today is Matthew Curtis, founder of the startup Vice Lotteries. Vice Lotteries is a new startup that aims to challenge state governments’ legal monopolies over lotteries. State lotteries are amazingly and bizarrely unethical. They drain billions of dollars out of communities, primarily poor ones. Lottery spending has increased substantially over the past decades, with the average lotto player spending $600 per year, and many spending significantly more than that. Vice Lotteries aims to create a more ethical alternative to state lotteries, allowing people to have the fun of gambling without losing significant amounts of money. From the Vice...

Today’s guest is Jamin Speer of the University of Memphis. We discuss his paper, “Are Changes of Major Major Changes? The Roles of Grades, Gender, and Preferences in College Major Switching” co-authored with Carmen Astorne-Figari. The choice of college major is a key stage in the career search, and over a third of college students switch majors at least once. We provide the first comprehensive analysis of major switching, looking at the patterns of switching in both academic and non-academic dimensions. Low grades signal academic mismatch and predict switching majors – and the lower the grades, the larger the switch...

Kevin Erdmann of the Mercatus Center returns to the podcast to discuss his new book, Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy. From the publisher’s website: The United States suffers from a shortage of well-placed homes. This was true even at the peak of the housing boom in 2005. Using a broad array of evidence on housing inflation, income, migration, homeownership trends, and international comparisons, Shut Out demonstrates that high home prices have been largely caused by the constrained housing supply in a handful of magnet cities leading the new economy. The same...

Today’s guest on Economics Detective Radio is Anja Shortland of King’s College London, discussing her new book Kidnap: Inside the Ransom Business, where she brings an economist’s perspective to the shady world of the kidnapping for ransom business and to the professionals who specialize in getting hostages home safely. The book’s description reads as follows: Kidnap for ransom is a lucrative but tricky business. Millions of people live, travel, and work in areas with significant kidnap risks, yet kidnaps of foreign workers, local VIPs, and tourists are surprisingly rare and the vast majority of abductions are peacefully resolved – often...

Mark Thornton returns to the podcast to discuss his new book The Skyscraper Curse (available digitally for free). The book discusses the connection between record-setting skyscrapers and economic recessions. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s introduction: The Skyscraper Index expresses the strange relationship between the building of the world’s tallest skyscraper and the onset of a major economic crisis. This relationship only came to light in 1999 when research analyst Andrew Lawrence published a report noting the odd connection between record-height buildings and noteworthy economic crises — that is, the skyscraper curse, a relationship that dated back nearly a century....

Today’s guest is Louis Rouanet from George Mason University. Our discussion focuses on an economic history paper he co-authored with Ennio Piano (a previous guest of the show), “Filling the Ranks: The Remplacement Militaire in Post-Revolutionary France.” Many economists have analyzed the efficiency of a volunteered army relative to a conscripted army. However, they have rarely studied the working of real-world alternative, market-based, military institutions where military obligations are traded among the citizens. This paper fills this gap by studying the rise and fall of the Remplacement Militaire in 18th and 19th century France. This system endured for more than...

Today’s guest is economic historian Gregory Clark, and our topic is England’s New Poor Law of 1834. Gregory and his co-author, Marianne E. Page, wrote a paper on the topic entitled “Welfare reform, 1834: Did the New Poor Law in England produce significant economic gains?” Spoiler alert: It didn’t. (more…) Subscribe to Economics Detective Radio on iTunes, Android, or Stitcher.The post Classical Economics and the New Poor Law with Gregory Clark appeared first on The Economics Detective

Today’s guest is Mikayla Novak (Twitter, SSRN) of the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub at RMIT University. Her work focuses on some innovative new and potential uses for blockchain technology. As we all know at this point, the first use of blockchain technology was to create decentralized digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. But a blockchain is a much more general technology than this: it is a decentralized ledger that is resistant to tampering by any one individual. As such, it is a technical innovation that can allow us to coordinate activities that a lack of trust may have prevented otherwise....

[Note: I was not compensated for this post. However, I do have a $100 USD referral code and I do get paid if you use it. Yay, discounts!] I’ve had my ReMarkable tablet for over a year now and I can’t imagine life without it. I am constantly carrying it with me, pulling it out to jot down notes during meetings, or to read PDFs on the SkyTrain, or to sketch out ideas for one of my creative projects. I start many of my days by jotting down a to-do list on my ReMarkable. It has taken the place of...

Today’s guest is Martin Gurri (Twitter, blog), author of The Revolt of the Public. We discuss his book, which deals with the impact of information technology on political trends and populism. In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.” Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people...

Have you ever experienced learning a new word and then hearing it everywhere in the days after you learn it? I’ve had a similar experience since making my argument that the burden of proof that the minimum wage is beneficial falls on the law’s supporters. Now I’m seeing people making burden-of-proof arguments everywhere. Bryan Caplan, in a post on EconLog, quotes Mike Huemer making the argument explicitly: [T]here is a kind of moral presumption against coercive interventions. Laws are commands backed up by threats of coercive imposition of harm on those who disobey them. Harmful coercion against an individual generally requires...

The Guardian reports that Abba’s wild outfits were influenced by Swedish tax laws: According to Abba: The Official Photo Book, published to mark 40 years since they won Eurovision with Waterloo, the band’s style was influenced in part by laws that allowed the cost of outfits to be deducted against tax – so long as the costumes were so outrageous they could not possibly be worn on the street. I think this qualifies as a Pigovian tax. The post Rock Stars Respond to Incentives Like the Rest of Us appeared first on The Economics Detective

An opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson, written by one Sandra Y. L. Korn, is a work of such utter sophistry that the fact that it comes from the top academic institution on the globe is not the least bit surprising. Korn argues that Harvard should jettison academic freedom in favour of her concept of “justice.” In its oft-cited Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors declares that “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” In principle, this policy seems sound: It would not do for academics to...

Here’s a passage from Human Action that I just found so interesting that I had to post it in its entirety (pp. 767-69 of the Scholar’s Edition): Knowledge of the effects of government interference with market prices makes us comprehend the economic causes of a momentous historical event, the decline of ancient civilization. It may be left undecided whether or not it is correct to call the economic organization of the Roman Empire capitalism. At any rate it is certain that the Roman Empire in the second century, the age of the Antonines, the “good” emperors, had reached a high...

I was reading the comments on another blog, where I found someone complaining about Austrian (and Austrian-sympathizing) economists. This person’s undergraduate institution had a few Austrian (and Austrian-sympathizing) economists who would closely watch bright students (like vultures!), befriend them (how creepy!), help them to get TA-ships (oh no!), and invite them to private seminars where there would be uncritical readings of Hayek (the horror!). There were no similar opportunities offered by mainstream professors. This person’s distaste for Austrians seems to have clouded his thinking. He thinks the Austrians were doing a bad thing, inducting people into some kind of cult....

This series of pictures of castles and NYC apartments has been trending on the internet. (more…) The post NYC Apartments Cost as Much as Castles (and People Just Don’t Get Why) appeared first on The Economics Detective

In Human Action, Mises distinguishes between what he calls “class probability” and “case probability.” He defines class probability as such: Class probability means: We know or assume to know, with regard to the problem concerned, everything about the behavior of a whole class of events or phenomena; but about the actual singular events or phenomena we know nothing but that they are elements of this class. This is the ordinary sort of probability. We reach into an urn containing seven red balls and two white balls, so the probability of choosing a red ball is 7:2. We can say this because...

When calico printed cloth was introduced to Europe, the French government banned it. They employed gestapo-style tactics to stamp out the new innovation. Here’s Murray Rothbard’s summary of the fiasco, from his excellent An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (vol. 1, p. 219): The new cloth, printed calicoes, began to be imported from India in the 1660s, and became highly popular, useful for an inexpensive mass market, as well as for high fashion. As a result, calico printing was launched in France. By the 1680s, the indignant woollen, cloth, silk and linen industries all complained to the state of ‘unfair competition’...

Under the common law, lawyers are not allowed to ask witnesses “leading questions,” as witnesses can be influenced by the way questions are asked. A leading question is one that suggests a particular answer, for instance, “Were you at the country club on Saturday night?” is a leading question, while, “Where were you on Saturday night?” is not. Econometricians should be as careful as lawyers when questioning the most unreliable of all witnesses: economic data. Most statistical software will automatically spit out t-tests for whether the coefficients in regression models equal zero. This is equivalent to asking the data, “Data, given these...